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1John Taylor Gatto at Carnegie Hall N.Y. 1991
2
3The title of this presentation is named after my mother, who was a wonderful German
4lady named Bootie Zimmer. And this is called "Bootie Zimmer's Choice."
5
6The government began to compel us to send all our children to school in 1852 in the
7State of Massachusetts. And from that state the compulsion spread slowly south, west
8and north--far too slowly to support the false contention that forced schooling was
9popular anywhere. But in 1818, 34 years before the first compulsory school laws,
10Noah Webster estimated that over 5 million copies of his spelling book had been sold
11in a country of under 20 million population. And when you consider that every
12purchase decision had to be made freely by an individual or a family, when you
13consider there were no federal, state or city tabs on which to run bulk purchases,
14it would seem to suggest that most people don't have to be tricked or compelled to
15learn. Most people in a natural setting will do it on their own because they want
16to. Each spelling book purchase decision was made privately. In each case, someone
17forked over cash to buy a book.
18
19Now, according to the National Library Association, the American Library Association
20that is, only one adult American in every eleven does that anymore. I gave the
21keynote speech for the Library Convention in Colorado last year and the librarians
22told me that only one adult American in every eleven buys books. So you can see we
23must have been radically literate by modern standards in those by-gone days.
24
25Between 1813 and 1823, Sir Walter Scott sold five million copies of his books in the
26United States, too. That's about equal, proportionately, to a sale of sixty million
27books today; and James Fennimore Cooper's books?think of "Last of the Mohicans"?that
28was a big movie last year?also sold millions and millions of copies. Now, if you
29pick up a Cooper or a Scott at your local library, you will discover that both
30authors write complex, highly illusive prose, not easy reading even by a college
31student today. That's your defense against people who tell you, Yes, but what did
32they read?
33
34In 1812, Pierre Dupont Denamour (Sp.?)?he was the founder of the Dupont fortune in
35the United States?published a book called "Education in the United States"?remember,
36this is 40 years before we had any compulsion schooling at all; and in that book he
37expressed his amazement at the phenomenal literacy he saw everywhere. Forty years
38before passage of our first compulsion school laws, Dupont said that fewer than four
39out of every thousand people in the new nation could not read and do numbers well.
40Looking around himself and comparing what he saw with the continental traditions he
41had left behind, he saw a world in which nearly every child was skilled in
42argumentation because, he said, of the widespread habit of involving young children
43in disputes about the meaning of ambiguous Bible passages at the breakfast table.
44
45Two decades later a French aristocrat named DeToqueville recognized that the common
46citizens in the new nation were the best-educated people in history. You might want
47to consider that we had no state compulsion schooling at that time, although we did
48have abundant schools, virtually none of them containing more than 60 students or
49running longer than 12 to 16 weeks.
50
51In 1837, another French aristocrat named Michael Chevalier wrote that it was common
52practice for American dirt farmers to take books to the fields with them to read
53while they were plowing. But still we had no government compulsion schools in 1837.
54It appears that before 1852, when Massachusetts got compulsion schooling, the
55American people were educating themselves quite well?sometimes they used traditional
56forms of schooling; sometimes they invented new kinds of schooling; and sometimes
57they substituted for formal schooling, as Benjamin Franklin did, as they best saw
58fit. As they best saw fit, they understood to be the prescription for a free
59country. As the authorities best see fit, the formula of a dictatorship.
60
61Our early catch as catch can entrepreneurial forms of instruction offered abundant
62choices of useful ways to grow up, useful ways to read, write, and think.
63Historically, schooling was about literacy and that is why it succeeded so well.
64Literacy is not very difficult to achieve for children when they perceive that the
65adults about them think that it's important.
66
67The secret to our amazing mastery of literacy in those far-off days has its
68foundation in the fact that reading, writing, and numbers are easy to learn in spite
69of what we hear today from the reading, writing, and numbers establishments whose
70bread and butter depends on convincing taxpayers that the opposite is true. If that
71seems like too big a reach for you or a radical statement, consider the real meaning
72of what Jaime Escalanti demonstrated in southern California before he was driven out
73of his school. And that is that Mexican immigrant children with no traditional
74scholarship at all have no more difficulty with advanced mathematics than anybody
75else does as long as they perceive that the adults around them consider it something
76worthwhile to do.
77
78A few private schools and many private individuals still understand this basic truth
79and still manage to install literacy correctly at a fraction of the cost of public
80schooling. A big part of the secret lies in keeping the instruction intimate and
81tailoring it to the individual. Trained personnel and prepared material prepared by
82teacher colleges aren't necessary and actually may get in the way.
83
84I'm going to give you two examples of places operating at this moment which have
85taught literacy successfully, inexpensively, and universally for decades. Each uses
86a very different theory and practice from the other, and I think if the two schools'
87staffs were in a room together a fist fight might break out; and nevertheless I've
88visited both and all of their students read extremely well.
89
90In Philadelphia, PA, at 8801 Stenton Avenue in Chestnut Hill is an impressive estate
91behind a high stone wall in which is located a school called the Institute for the
92Achievement for Human Potential. Actually, about seven weeks ago the Wall Street
93Journal featured them on the front page but they've been open for 40 years. For
94decades the Institute has been teaching young infants to read and teaching mothers
95of these young infants to teach their children to read. You may not agree with that
96as a goal of early education, but in the interest of truth you can hardly deny that
97it is both possible to do and not very difficult. They don't have any failures; nor
98do they have much of a bell curve.
99
100Indeed, it doesn't require much expert assistance, either, if any; and babies learn
101to add, subtract, multiply and divide at this place as easily as they learn to read,
102and every single one of the students, although they're not drawn from elite
103families, learns to play the violin and?this is eccentric?to speak Japanese. The
104proprietor thinks that everyone should speak Japanese and they all do. What? You
105don't think that infants can learn to do all those things? But what about all those
106millions of Japanese speaking babies in Japan?
107
108You might want to ask your local school superintendent or teacher college guru if
109they know anything at all about this business; and if not, why not.
110
111The next place couldn't agree less with the notion of teaching infants to read. It's
112the beautiful Sudbury Valley school 20 miles east of Boston in the old Nathaniel
113Bowdage (?) cottage. Nathaniel Bowdage is the guy who wrote the American Practical
114Navigator in the 1830s. It's still in print and every boat that sails the inner
115coastal waterways today has a copy. And what a cottage was in those days was a
116fabulous mansion with 50 or 60 rooms. Anyway, in this cottage, which looks
117suspiciously like a mansion to my eyes, the place ringed by handsome outbuildings, a
118private lake, woods, and acres and acres of magnificent grounds, in this school
119reading and arithmetic are not taught. But lest you think that this is some
120cockamamie experience, two-thirds of the graduates go to the college of their first
121choice, and almost all of the remainder?the school tracks every one of its
122graduates?opens a business in preference to continuing their formal schooling. It's
123a private school but the tuition is only $3,500 a year. And if you keep in mind that
124in New York City the public school tuition is $9,300 a year and nationally it's
125$6,000 a year on the average, according to the New York Times, then $3,500 a year is
126quite a bargain.
127
128Kids teach themselves reading and arithmetic at the Subdury Valley School. The
129school is from age 4 to age 18; they can draw on the resident faculty as often as
130they want as long as they are willing to meet the conditions that the faculty sets
131down. All the formal teaching is done by private negotiation; and once the kids
132says, yeah, I want to learn trigonometry, then the trig teacher can say, You have to
133meet this conditions or learn from someone else. What rate of failure has Sudbury
134had in its better than 28 years of existence? As a public school man myself, it's
135embarrassing to say: none, it seems. Every kid who spent any time at the school has
136learned to read and compute. Sudbury informs me it has never seen a case of
137dyslexia. It does not believe such a condition exists.
138
139Sudbury doesn't teach reading. Unlike the Philadelphia school I mentioned, all its
140kids eventually learn to read and even to like reading. The school has a 20 thousand
141book library, all on open shelves, for its 150-odd kids. Sudbury doesn't teach
142reading, yet everyone learns to read. That poses a frustrating puzzle for many
143observers who have been conditioned by 20th century educational psychology to
144believe that children learn best in a precise, pedagogically understood way; and
145yet, if these formal learning theories were true, we would be faced with the dilemma
146of explaining how Thomas Paine's revolutionary treatise, Common Sense, which is one
147of the foundation stones of the American Revolution, sold 600,000 copies in 1776 in
148a nation of 3 million, about 20% of whom were African slaves and 50% of the
149remainder were indentured servants.
150
151Now, Common Sense is taught in graduate seminars today at elite colleges. But
152apparently the ignorant American population at the time of the Revolution wasn't so
153ignorant at all. They bought these books, unless you think they bought them for
154their coffee tables.
155
156The last example I have to show how easy it is to learn to read and do arithmetic
157well is myself. In 1941 when I went to first grade in Swissville, PA, a borough of
158Pittsburgh, at the age of five I could read complicated books without a coach and I
159understood enough of those books to read with enthusiasm. The last thing I read at
160home before I went to school to learn Twinkle Twinkle Little Star was Matthew
161Arnold's 19th century epic poem about Persia, .... Don't be hard on yourself if
162you've never heard of that. I liked ... and I wondered, I recall, what delights
163first grade was going to hold.
164
165If you find that hard to believe or exceptional, I want to suggest that the reason
166for that disbelief lies in the elimination of the historical memory and its
167replacement by something called social science by policy makers who've controlled
16820th century schooling. Remember that for the first 200 years of U.S. history, most
169schools wouldn't accept children who couldn't read and count, so they must have
170learned those things where I did: at home. The miracle woman who taught me to read
171was Francis Bootie Zimmer, who graduated from Manongahila (?) high school in 1929.
172And if you're saying, Where? that's where Joe Montana graduated from about 30 years
173later. A woman from a little coal mining steel mill town in western Pennsylvania,
174Bootie never got a college degree but nobody despaired about that in those days
175because daily life seemed to run very well without too many college graduates
176around.
177
178Here was Bootie's method. She held me in her lap and read to me while she ran her
179finger under the words. From the time I was two years old she read to me every
180single day from increasingly difficult books, none of which ever seemed hard to me
181because I was having so much fun. She read real fairy tales, not sanitized ones,
182real history books and real newspaper stories. What she avoided like the plague were
183scientific readers of any sort, the books with 364 word pseudo-scientific
184vocabularies and lots and lots of pictures.
185
186Here I've presented you with a very great mystery and its general principles and
187with some specific cases. We had a perfectly literate country before the advent of
188government schooling in 1852. What on earth has happened since? Why aren't we a
189literate society in our present well-schooled era if we once were in a lightly
190schooled one?
191
192The structure of 20th century schooling is modeled on a system invented in early
19319th century Prussia after Napoleon's amateur soldiers beat the professional
194soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena in 1806. When your business is renting
195soldiers to other countries, losing a battle like that is not taken lightly. Almost
196immediately afterwards the philosopher Johann Fickda delivered his famous address to
197the German nation in which the Prussians were told that the nation was going to be
198shaped up to a new utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would
199learn how to take orders.
200
201Prussia is such an important country in terms of its influence on the development of
202American institutions I wish we had some time to talk about it. The formation of
203Prussia was the result of the last crusade of the Catholic Popes, one which did not
204go into the Holy Land but to the northeast of Europe to pacify the pagan Prussians.
205So it is right under the surface a religious state; and if you say, but it doesn't
206exist anymore, what Prussia did was absorb Germany in 1871, about half the
207combatants on both sides of the American Revolution. The actual figure is 48% were
208German mercenaries and many of these were Prussian, including our brilliant tactical
209officer, Baron Von Stueben. He was a phony baron but he was a good soldier.
210
211While our Revolution was being contested back home in Prussia, to give you some
212flavor of what this country was like in 1776, all Prussian women had to register at
213the local police station every month when their menses stopped?that was Prussia in
2141776. It got better as it went on. 43 years later that state gave the world its
215first successful national forced government schooling scheme, a national curriculum,
216national testing, and a national teacher corps.
217
218Modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819. You're going to see the
219connection with our schooling in just a moment, with a clear vision of what
220schooling ought to deliver. It ought to deliver l) obedient soldiers to the army, 2)
221obedient workers to the mines, 3) subservient civil servants for the government, 4)
222subservient clerks for industry, and 5) citizens who thought alike about all major
223issues.
224
225This Prussian system was intended to create an artificial national consensus on
226matters worked out in advance by leading German families and the heads of
227institutions. So what the Prussian brain trust did between 1810 and 1820 was to work
228out a technique through which the common mind could be dumbed down and made
229incapable of thinking. I want to read you some of the particulars of that technique:
230One was compulsory school attendance at schools that worked very similar to each
231other; second was government trained and approved teachers?no one else was to have
232access to children; three was the departmental plan of instruction; four was the
233detailed plan of work to be accomplished in each grade was presented to the school
234by the government; five was a highly articulated system of supervision in each
235grade.
236
237Now, if you think for a moment that between 1850?actually, from the beginning of the
23819th century until the beginning of the 20th century?most American schooling was
239utterly unsupervised by a professional cadre of management; it was supervised by the
240parents whose children were in the schools.
241
242The schools were almost all one and two-room schools; they were exclusively run by
243women who supervised themselves in cooperation with the parents and the local
244communities.
245
246So Prussia short-circuited that. It was a movement to larger and larger units, the
247classification of children by their test performance, and finally, it was always a
248delivered curriculum rather than a locally created one. A very small number of
249passionate American ideological leaders, all the people associated with the
250formation of American schooling including Horris Mann of Massachusetts, Calvin Stowe
251of Ohio, Borna Sears of Connecticut and many others, visited Prussia in the first
252half of the 19th century, fell in love with the order, obedience and efficiency they
253saw there attributed to well-regulated machine-like society to its educational
254system and campaigned relentlessly upon returning home to bring the Prussian vision
255to these shores.
256
257At the very same time through the utopian Socialist colonies that were springing up
258all over the United States in this period, it is estimated that between 1805 and
2591860 there were over a l,000 utopian socialist experiments taking place in the
260United States, most of them short lived. The Prussian ideal of an idyllic childhood
261free of care and responsibility?see, we can be fooled easily by thinking of these
262people as absolutely mechanical and rigid and militaristic, and they were, but first
263they found that the easiest way to enter a child's mind and colonize it was to
264present the child with no challenges at all in the early part of their life with
265lots of color and music and games. And then when you sprung the trap at about the
266age of 12, the kids were defenseless.
267
268Pestalotsi and Foible are two names you hear a lot in school circles. They were the
269theorist practitioners of Prussian schooling. And Robert Owens' utopian social
270colony at New Harmony in western Indiana was privileged to host Pestalotsi's
271principal English speaking interpreter as its own head of schools. That's the most
272direct link from the Prussian system into a practicing school system in the United
273States was in place by 1825.
274
275Prussian policy-makers had learned by experimentation that it was easier to apply
276behavior shaping techniques to children who knew very little and were only modestly
277literate. Foible's kindergarten, with its early removal of the child's parents and
278the child's culture from the scene and its replacement of serious learning with
279songs, games, pictures and organized group activity, was remarkably effective in
280delivering compliant material to the state.
281
282In the United States, the Prussian training methods were actively spread by
283Elizabeth Peabody of the Boston Peabody family and others equally well placed. Ms.
284Peabody was the sister of Mary Peabody, who was Mrs. Horace Mann, so the connection
285was an honest one.
286
287The ultimate goal of Prussian schools was to unify the country under centralized
288political leadership, not to teach literacy. And it was no conspiracy. They were
289quite open about what they were doing. By 1852, when our first forced schooling
290appeared, the goal of important leadership in the northeastern United States was to
291mold the hordes of immigrant Irish Catholics whose immigration was being encouraged
292to provide a cheap labor supply. These newcomers would be bent to a national
293consensus based on the New England cultural model, a plan which necessitated the
294destruction of the southern tidewater cultural model, a detail accomplished soon
295after we got forced schooling by the defeated South in the Civil War, a conflict
296which had very little to do with slavery but much to do with outlook and world view.
297
298To reach synthetic consensus as Prussia demonstrated, children would have to be
299removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural and religious influences,
300too. The tabula rasa could only be written upon away from prying eyes and competing
301influences, and school would provide an isolation chamber for doing that. In making
302up this form of isolated school experience, our policy makers were following the
303model of John Jacque Rousseau, who would set it down in his book Emile in the middle
304of the 18th century. Prussia had followed the model of Rousseau first, and we came
305second.
306
307So at the behest of Horace Mann and other leading citizens, without any national
308debate at all or discussion, we adopted Prussian schooling, or rather most of us had
309it imposed upon them. Yet there was an obstacle in the way of reaching Prussian
310perfection: that was the traditional form of school size, shape, and government,
311those wonderful one and two-room school houses run by the women of America,
312unsupervised. They were highly efficient as academic transmitters, as breeders of
313self-reliance and independence. They were intimately related to their communities,
314they were almost exclusively female run and they had to be put to death.
315
316Remember that academic prowess and self-reliance were no longer the purposes of
317schooling, at least on a policy level. During the first 50 years of our new school
318systems, say from 1852 to 1900, the Prussian purpose was to create a form of what we
319would call today Welfare State Socialism. It gradually forced out the traditional
320American purpose: to prepare the individual for an independent and moral life. The
321factory economy could not use independent people, or thought it couldn't, and
322neither could the strong state form of society which influential men were struggling
323to bring into being. That, too, oddly enough, the strong state idea was largely a
324Prussian invention, the result of two very influential philosophers, Emanuel Kant
325and especially a fellow named George Hegel, without whom I don't think Karl Marx
326would have existed, both of whom had been canonized in the European American
327academic world of that time, the collegiate world.
328
329The Prussian social purpose was collective. The American social purpose as it has
330come down to us through our early history was individualistic. Prussia was a rigid
331programmatic class society; America had fluid classes and an easy disrespect for
332elite authority.
333
334In Prussia, the purpose was realized. See if this sounds familiar. By a three-tier
335school system, the lowest tier, which in Prussia comprised 94% of the students, went
336to schools called the volksschoolen, the people schools. Here socialization was the
337goal, the production of a cheerful, compliant proletariat, only lightly connected to
338their families, their cultures, and their religions. Thinking in Prussia was
339reserved for one kid out of every 16 and was apportioned among two further types of
340school houses. The highest form of thinking, analytical thinking, was reserved for
341the academies, which handled about one-half of one percent of the children. The
342other five and a half percent were educated at realschoolen or gymnasia. These were
343the service classes for the policy makers; engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers,
344high academics, writers and propagandists. They were to be taught partially how to
345think.
346
347In Prussia intellectual development?and this had been worked out mathematically over
348the conference table between 1810 and 1820?in Prussia intellectual development for
349the masses was regarded with managerial horror as something which caused armies to
350lose battles. That attitude was translated across the Atlantic along with Prussian
351school structure and procedures, and it reinforced the strong New England distrust
352of the poor. Of course, what they meant by the poor was 94% of the population.
353
354Where the three great classical civilizations of antiquity were gods to modern goal
355setting, Prussia preferred the long successful society of category regulated ancient
356Egypt to that of muscular Rome or intellectual Greece, both of which seemed to the
357Teutonic consciousness much less stable. In Egypt policy descended from a command
358elite. Think of that elite as the eye atop the pyramid on the reverse side of the
359U.S. dollar bill, the symbol which first appeared there in 1935 after the
360Prussianization of our schools was in its fourth, or socialization, phase.
361
362Let me quickly run through the five phases because I think it gives you a framework
363to judge events in our history. From 1750 to 1850 this thing was being conceived. It
364certainly would have had no chance to be executed at all. From 1850 to 1900
365political preparation was being made in state legislatures to accept this and
366eliminate the one room schools. From 1900 to 1920, the schools were industrialized.
367They were set up on a factory model and all of the administrators we hear about and
368all the specialized counseling positions were invented in this 1900 to 1920
369position. This is a category of employee which last year, according to an item I saw
370in U.S.A. Today while I was flying somewhere, now takes more than half of the tax
371money spent on schools is spent on administration. So that took place l900 to 1920.
372The fourth phase was to turn schools from an intellectual purpose to a social
373purpose. That was 1920 to 1960. And finally, from 1960 on, and these are rough
374approximations of the categorical boundaries, from 1960 on our schools have been
375psychological experimental laboratories. Schools have been psychologized and all the
376earlier tendencies also have been matured and refined.
377
378I hope you recognize that what I just described is schooling as it is practiced in
379the United States. To reach its goal, Prussia concocted a brilliant educational
380method based on complex fragmentation. It did not happen by accident that people
381never finish anything they start in schools. The method divided whole ideas into
382subjects, subjects into class periods, so that self-motivation to learn would be
383muted by ceaseless, irrational interruptions. Prussian schooling de-emphasized
384serious reading because readers had been found to be too independent of the
385leadership class. If you think the whole word method is bad, the Prussians had the
386whole sentence method. Forget words or letters. And unemployed readers, the
387Prussians said, were capable of discovering ways to make trouble. The whole Prussian
388system was built on the premise that isolation from first-hand experience and
389fragmentation of endless abstract information into units, lessons, assignments and
390disciplines would result in obedient and subordinate subject populations properly
391respectful of arbitrary orders because of long training in responding to them.
392
393Thus, those schooled would be unable to interfere with policy makers because while
394they could still protest and complain, they could not manage sustained or
395comprehensive thought. Well-schooled children, not well-educated children?there
396really is, I think, a need at this point to separate schooling from education?cannot
397think critically in any comprehensive way although they might make superb highly
398specialized analysts, nor can such children initiate effective protest when they
399grow up. The Prussian way of schooling removes the ability to think for oneself.
400
401The great Protestant theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, said that the Second World War
402was the inevitable result of Germany being the best schooled nation in the world.
403And Eric Ramir, who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, said that the First World
404War was the inevitable result of good school teaching. Now, those are in-house
405commentaries. The Prussian way of schooling removes the ability to think for
406oneself. Prussian teaching paralyzes the moral will as well as the intellect. The
407purest laboratory?get ready for a big surprise?the purest laboratory of the Prussian
408method in the world today is the Japanese system of school training. It is a little
409known fact that under the Meiji restoration of 1875 the Japanese Constitution that
410was installed then was virtually a word by word translation of the Prussian
411constitution of 1871. So Prussian prestige by that early date had reached all across
412the planet. It's also a very little known fact that the boundary between Canada and
413the United States was determined in 1845 by the king of Prussia; hence, the town
414near Philadelphia called King of Prussia to commemorate that.
415
416Three major ideas were transferred intact from Prussia and slowly worked themselves
417into the 20th century framework of American national schooling. The first was the
418very sophisticated notion that state schooling does not exist for the benefit of its
419students or their families but for the benefit of the state. Think of John F.
420Kennedy's inaugural speech in 1961, ?Ask not what you country can do for you, but
421what you can do for your country,? and you'll get some idea how this notion of the
422state as god crept into American life. In this idea the will of children has to be
423broken in order to make use of them later as plastic material. If the will can be
424broken, all else should follow. If you call to mind the curious coincidence that
425will breaking was the central logic of child rearing among our own Puritan colonists
426in Massachusetts, you will clearly see that a natural affinity exits between
427Prussian seeds and Puritan soil. It is no accident that Massachusetts invented our
428system of compulsion schooling which all the states now use.
429
430Children were not to be taught to think but only to memorize facts unrelated to
431their laws. There is a great utility in memorizing facts, if, in fact, those facts
432are related to your life. Memorization on one level is an essential glue to give
433continuity to families, communities, societies, and religions. But if its use can
434easily be perverted by the massive introduction of nonsense memory artificially
435bolstered by making the testing of these phantom memories the raison d??tre of going
436to school. A personal vacuum is created, an empty child, a blank tablet.
437
438This is a self-fulfilling prophecy with a vengeance. And in a strong state
439government command economy theories, it is only such populations which allow
440themselves to be scientifically managed. Children who think weaken the grasp of
441central authority. Children must be discouraged from pursuing their natural
442interests and their family interests for the same reason. In Prussian schooling,
443teachers define what children's interests should be but, of course, they really
444don't, since teachers are only in most large city systems at least a mask in front
445of the administrator transmission, and the administrators have no idea what they are
446transmitting.
447
448The second important idea in Prussian method was extreme fragmentation of wholes
449into fixed time periods, prethought sequences, externally imposed questioning,
450synthetic units and the like. This simplified many of the problems of leadership.
451Thought broken into fragments can be managed by a poorly trained teacher force.
452Fragments can be memorized even by a moron. Fragments memorized and disgorged
453created the appearance of mathematical precision in testing; fragments tested
454deliver beautiful distribution curves of supposed achievement, pretty bell curves.
455
456The third idea adopted from the Prussians was that the government is the true parent
457of children. The state is sovereign over the family and over the church. This, too,
458was the theme of New England Puritan life. You'll find it clearly illustrated in the
459New England Primer as well as many other traces across New England life. That such a
460scheme had been vigorously rejected by the Scotch Irish settlers in the back
461countries of colonial America as well as by the Anglo-Saxons of the tidewater south.
462It is this explanation which readily explains otherwise mystifying court decisions
463which rule that parents need not be told when schools dispense condoms to children
464or consulted when girls seek abortions.
465
466By 1889, a little over one hundred years ago, the crop from these Prussian seeds was
467ready to harvest. In that year the U.S. Commissioner of Education, a man named
468William Torey Harris, assured railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington that American
469schools had been "scientifically designed to prevent over education." The average
470American, said Huntington, would learn to be content with his fixed role in
471life?does that sound Egyptian to you??through schooling because he would not be
472tempted to think about any other role.
473
474By 1896 John Dewey was saying that independent, self-reliant people were an
475anachronism in the collective society in the future. In modern society, said Dewey,
476people would be defined by their associations, the groups to which they belong, not
477by their individual accomplishments. And such a world, said Dewey, people who read
478too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered. They
479know too much and they know how to find out what they don't know all by themselves
480without consulting experts.
481
482Dewey said the great mistake of historical pedagogy had been to make reading and
483writing constitute the center of early schoolwork. He advocated that the decoding
484method of teaching reading, the alphabet method that we call phonics today, be
485abandoned and replaced by the whole word method. At least he didn't favor the whole
486sentence method. And mind you, that was a concession because some people in Prussia
487said we should teach by the whole paragraph method.
488
489And this was advised not because Dewey thought the latter was more efficient. He
490advised getting rid of the alphabet method not because he thought the whole word
491method was more efficient. He admitted that it was less efficient, that because
492learning to read hard books too well produces independent thinkers and independent
493thinkers can't be socialized. By socialization, Dewey meant what a whole generation
494of activists who appeared between 1890 and World War I. He meant conditioning to a
495program of social objectives administered by the social thinkers of the government.
496Socialization was a giant step on the road to state socialism and it was and is a
497vision radically disconnected from America's past, its historic hopes and the dreams
498of independent families, independent religions, and independent livelihoods.
499
500Somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, making people dumb for their own good
501became the point of our national exercise in forced schooling. I know you'll find
502this a bit hard to believe, yet the track of this Prussianization over the past 150
503years is quite clear and Simon and Schuster just hired me to write a book about it
504which I have to deliver by July 15th.
505
506This began in the late 19th century and it continues right through today through a
507small band of very influential people substantially financed by money provided by
508the large private foundations like Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford. They have
509introduced what might be called modified scientific socialism into American
510institutional education. To do this they learned how to gain control of the
511machinery of government, and then in direct violation of the letter and spirit of
512our constitution and our Bill of Rights they began to destroy the mechanism of local
513controlled schooling, vesting control in a continually centralizing, highly radical
514and very, very undemocratic form of government. Supporting these developments was an
515increasingly complete control over the public oversight mechanisms of journalism
516which now provided the cloak of invisibility over what was really happening. This
517small band of influential people had determined privately that this was the best
518course for the American state; and so with no public discussion and little wasted
519motion they pointed our nation down the statist road. We were going to become a
520multi-tiered class society like Germany or Japan, and that is, in fact, what we are
521well on the way to becoming.
522
523The famous British mathematician and philosopher, Bertrand Russell, observed in
5241926, about 70 years ago, that American mass schooling was the most radical social
525experiment in human history. He said, although not critically, he was just
526commenting, that America was deliberately preventing its children from learning how
527to think. So the movement toward big state socialism is not a historical curiosity,
528but it's a powerful, dynamic force in the world around us.
529
530One of the favorite words of education bureaucrats today is socialization and that
531was the term made prominent by John Dewey, who was the leader of the Fabian
532Socialist Movement in the America of his time. I think the Fabians are a fascinating
533case study because they cracked the problem that had given trouble to other
534socialist thinkers, utopian socialists and the scientific socialists. The Fabians
535said that at the very top of the pyramid the society could work in a free market
536way. But all the rest of the pyramid, the bottom 94 percent, would have to be
537programmed and regulated and put on schedules.
538
539The training ground for socialist world society has been in our schools and
540continues to be our schools although a complex countermovement is underway to
541decentralize government schooling. I just came from San Francisco where I spent
542three hours with a delightful guy who runs the San Francisco Hebrew Academy. His
543name is Rabbi Pinkus Lipner and it's a name I think you're going to hear again
544because he's assembling an enormous team to push through a voucher proposal in
545California in the 1995 election.
546
547And writing that voucher proposal, it was my privilege to meet Nobel Prize winner
548Milton Friedman, who has guaranteed that the legislation can be written to keep the
549state at arm's length.
550
551Centralized schooling is at present combating the threats to its continuation, with
552demands for even more control over children's lives and even more money to pay for
553the extended school day and year that such control would require. The technique
554being used to motivate compliance is a drum beat of manufactured fears?fear of
555foreign competition, for example, which we are told threatens our entire economy.
556
557Now, the calls for increased doses of centralized schooling serve a different master
558than the intellectual development. I note with interest the growth of daycare in the
559United States and the frequent calls to extend schooling downward to include four
560year olds and three years, and in New York City now the call is to open schooling
561for two year olds. Kindergarten was created in Germany to be, and was quietly
562celebrated as, a gentle way to break the influence of mothers on their own children.
563
564Now, I haven't yet supplied you with a sensible motive for the growth of this
565indecent interference in the intimate lives of families, cultures, and churches; and
566I'll supply the motive and then say good day to you. A sensible motive which might
567explain the compliance of millions of otherwise hard-headed citizens in the dismal
568record of schooling, and its increasingly aggressive shakedown of the taxpayer, why
569has not this failed institution been allowed to collapse?
570
571The answer lies in the transformation of schooling from a simple service to families
572into an enormous, remotely controlled commercial enterprise. Schools are the single
573largest employer in the United States; they are the largest mediator of contracts.
574The low visibility phenomenon of schooling as a big business provides it with
575powerful political friends, advocates, and many other useful allies. This explains
576in a large part why no amount of failure ever changes things for very long in
577schools. School people are in the financial position to outlast any storm they feel
578and to keep short attention public scrutiny thoroughly confused by promises to
579reform after the next meeting.
580
581Granted, the short history of American public schools, barely a century old as a
582widespread government monopoly, reveals the standard pattern. Periodic public
583outrage is followed in every case by an enlargement of this monopoly. The net effect
584of public clamor has been to diminish, not enlarge, the range of worthwhile
585alternatives. Surely, this is the richest of all ironies and a testimonial to the
586interests served by schooling exactly as it is. To underline how insidious the
587established school institution really is, it's only necessary to regard two famous
588American school teachers of recent memory: Jaime Escalanti and Marva Collins.
589
590Mr. Escalanti demonstrated how widely distributed is the ability to do advanced
591mathematics skillfully, but by demonstrating that that power existed among Mexican
592immigrant children he found himself humiliated, insulted, and driven out of his high
593school last year at the peak of his fame.
594
595Ms. Collins showed that Chicago ghetto children in the worst black ghetto in Chicago
596can enthusiastically tackle Shakespeare and Plato and learn to master it and enjoy
597complicated language; and her reward was to be driven from her school in much the
598same fashion that Escalanti was driven from his.
599
600We have created a system in which teaching that is attuned to the way children learn
601involves a dynamic too complicated to bureaucratize and so it is not allowed. That
602is the real reason that our famously successful one room school houses were
603deliberately put to death; they were too successful, they were too inexpensive, and
604they produced people who were too much independent thinkers. In the system reform
605will never attempt to restore this quality because it would put the system out of
606business. There are no incentives for the owners of the present school structure to
607reform it. That will only happen if significant outside competition threatens to
608expose its fatal shortcomings.
609
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